New Production Schedule

Sorry for not updating the production schedule recently. This shedule now has all the completed sections removed as there was a lot of it. (Hooray for completing tasks!)

It now shows everything we have to do starting next week till hand in. This also includes the remaining inking that Al and James did not complete.

As shown, myself and Daryl must try to complete the inking that Ali was meant to do by Monday and James is also giving his scenes a go for Monday too.

It is a shame that James did not contact us sooner, especially considering he was having difficulties using the programs (even with my tutorial). Although I am confident that he will have a lot done for Monday. I showed him, a second time, how to use the programs on Friday and he showed good progress by completing a few keyframes that day.

Good luck everyone. Remember the tutorial should still be up (look down this page for link) otherwise contact me and i'll send you the tutorial or help you out myself.

Today Me and Daryl have finished inking in all the 2nd Year’s audience animations. It is also the day of hand-in for Ali and James for there inked in scenes. Unfortunately neither Alireiza or James have completed their scenes, nor have they started them. James did admit that he was having trouble with colouring and required me to show him again, how to do the inking/digitizing. Unfortunately, we didn’t hear from Aliereza at all. We tried going to his house one more time and caught him on the way back. He unfortunately denied to me and Daryl ever wanting to do the inking and assured us he never said he wanted to, even though it was his idea in the first place. It is a shame, if Alireiza had come to us sooner then we could have finished his scene ourselves. We still are, in fact, going to finish his scenes ourselves, although this time we will be doing it outside the deadline we set in place.

I have also finished modelling some stage lights and stage railings for the scene to add to the environment a little. Elisha's lights worked nicely with the doctor's room but looked out of place in the rest of the stage. So I've created some lights and railings and darted them all over the place. I made sure to put them behind the set, along with some curtains to maek it even obvious that this is a television set. In some shots the walls of teh tv set end and it is empty. This may maek it look like we made a mistake in production so to counter this I have built these purposefully to fill these areas so it is obvious that camera positions are intentional.

This week I have also redone the animation of the plants in the water of the fish scene in Anja's film. She told me she didn't like it and wanted me to redo it. She told me to animate from the bottom of the stems of the plants and make it really subtle gentle movements until the fish are meant to swim away then they wll move more.

This is what I have done...

Notice I animated from the bottom of the stems at all times, and tried to keep it natural looking also.

Fat Back Gravy Can Texture

Also today I finished the Fat Back Bits in Gravy can label which we will be using a close up of for the product placement shots.

I based the design loosely on the Heinz Baked Bean tin, but with my own style. Please note that the Pig’s face is done by Lewis taylor from 2nd year, it is one of his concept pieces of work and said it was fine for us to use.

Here is the texture.

Jame’s Email

James E-mailed me last night asking for a tutorial on Flash. I presume this means he hasn’t had much progress with his inking. I have created a tutorial for him and have sent it to him by E-mail. Good job I made the tutorial anyway :P

Argh!

Me and Daryl have tried calling, txt messaging and e-mailing Alierza to find out how his progress is going with the inking on flash.  After what happened before with his animation falling behind time we are worried he will not get it done.  I am willing to help him if he needs it but if he doesn’t get in contact with me then I don’t see how I can.

I even decided to go to his house to see if I could catch him there to see what was going on but unfortunately he wasn’t in.  Looks like me and Daryl should be prepared for the worst just in case.

Tutorial up + even MORE cranes

http://www.woofiles.com/dl-192940-Uo7jHp2V-TutorialFlashInking.pdf

I created a tutorial for inking in Flash if anyone needs it. I tried to list everything from how to do it, and solving potential problems.

I have also redone Anja's crane placement yet again. She now wants even more cranes, enough to practically fill the screen and is now saying she wants pretty much all the cranes with 4 or 5 cranes on each string. This is annoying as it means all of my placement from before is almost worthless. Although as director, she is allowed to have these opinions of her work, it is still unfortunate for myself as I feel I have wasted time. Still at least this time it will be perfect.. at least I hope so.

To save time and so I didn't have to redo the entire animation, I have decided to keep teh cranes that are there and simply add to them with the new 4 or 5 sets of cranes. I will be deeting all the ones at the end near the window though as these will be more noticable to the audience. There are so many cranes in the rest of the scene that it will hardly be noticable, so I have just dotted a lot all around the rest of the scene.

I sent an e-mail to Ali to see how his progress is going. We haven’t seen him in college since last Wednesday and we are a bit worried whether he is doing the work or not. We can’t get hold of him on the phone either.

Repositioned Cranes

Today I also redid Anja's crane room as requested. She said she didn't want ANY cranes in the centre, even though she agreed to it before she obviously doesn't like them there, which is fair enough.

She also wanted a LOT more cranes in apparently. So.. to do this I took all the cranes from the camera's path and repositioned them all. I then duplicated some of the referenced cranes from within the scene and duplicated them more. Anja also asked me to put a few cranes on the same string. This is very difficult with the files I have as I have already animated them. Still, i found cranes with similar animations and put them together so they looked like they were moving each other crane on the same string, to look more realistic.

She also wanted all the cranes around the table to be removed and have only a few around the sides.

1000 Cranes for a hospital room

This week I was asked to place hundreds of cranes inside Anja’s hospital room scene. She had a reference for the crane that can be referenced inside the scene.

I didn’t want to continuously reference the same file hundreds of times as this would make it difficult to work with alter on when the reference editor would be filled with hundreds of links.

To make things easier for everyone I decided to have one reference file with hundreds of cranes in and to reference just that one file.

I also fixed the string they were hanging from as they were a ridiculously large poly size for something hardly noticable. I reduced it from around 60 polys to around 4. I kept it at 4 incase Anja wanted a little definition on it.

To make all the cranes I took the original and duplicated them six times. I them changed the size of these 6 cranes so they are all slightly different to each other.

I then animated all of the cranes individually so that 3 cranes (one small one medium and one large) would rotate slowly as if hanging freely from the ceiling, to the left and back and forth. I then rotated the remaining cranes to the right and back and forth. This meant I could, theoretically duplicate all of these and have different sized, different moving cranes. They were all the same speed though. So I then duplicated the entire lien of cranes twice. The first set i made move slower than the original and the second set I made move slightly quicker than original.

I now have a complete set of cranes all of different sizes moving at different speeds in different directions. Nice.

I then simply duplicated the cranes several times until I had my very own Crane Clone Army. This is now set up so I can begin moving in each crane into the scene. This is the start of moving in the cranes.

It took me days to do, but eventually I had all the cranes in the scene. Anja said I could put them everywhere in the scene. But obviously not in front of where the camera was moving. I asked whether I could put a few near the centre so the camera could dolly past a few cranes which I thought could look nice. She said it was fine and so this is what I created.

She didn't ask me to do this, but I thought I might be helpful and do some test renders and test compositing for this scene. I created about 10 seperate render layers inside the maya file and rendered out each individual layer. I then imported them into AfterFX to test what it could look like. She said the cranes would appear in the scene whilst the girl is making the cranse in the room and whilst the camera dollys through. I don't have the 2D animation but I thought I would geuss some timings in accordance with the camera dolly that Anja previously animated in the scene. Here is what I ended up with.

20th May, Wednesday

Today i bumped into Alierza and told him how James was going to ink in his scenes, and the head deflation scene and if he could give us his 2D animations so that we could start inking them in on flash. He asked me and Daryl if he could give it a try so i let him know that I gave James till next week friday to get his scenes done so his scenes would have to be done by that date also. Even though that is three days less time than James has had he has agreed to do it for us anyway.

I have updated the Production Schedule again..

Newer production Schedule

Ok Elisha, now you have no excuse :P

New and possibly only production schedule!!!

Here's the the production schedule for the rest of term. It's near the end people, so follow the schedule and we should be fine. :)

It will be updated when we have more information. You'll all be told/asked what you can do though so don't worry, no ones name will be put next to any task without them knowing :)

Today I decided that Sam’s intro was great, but really wasn’t good enough for our film... simply because it looks to modern for our film.

In order to make sure I asked a few members of our group again whether changing it was worth it. Daryl wasn’t too bothered about Sam's design either way, he thought it looked good as it was but did agree with my comments. I asked Elisha also and she too thought that it wouldn’t fit with the style of our film.

I came up with an idea where we can still use most of the assets of Sam’s film so it wasn’t wasted time on Sam’s part but also fits in place with our film more. This was that the film could start off playing on an old 50s television set in black and white and a fuzzy screen. It would then zoom literally into the screen where it will then look straight through the ‘cameras’ of the broadcasting stage. Basically zooming back into our original animation.

This idea was helped from a previous group meeting we had with Kieron Dennis a while ago when showing him our storyboards/animatics of our progress with story ideas. He helped us brainstorm several ideas in several areas of the film, one being that the film could be entirely on an old television set. Although we didn’t catch on to the idea at the time it is obvious that it helped me come up with this idea for a new intro at this stage.

Daryl agreed that I could start working on the assets for this intro when I have time.

We knew that it is getting late to change things, especially considering the film isn’t near completion yet, but I still feel strongly that a different approach like this needs to be taken in order for our film to fit together well.

Thursday 7th May

Attempted a rough lighting test and composition test with 2D over 3D. Saw a potential problem of Daryl's animation being that RAM is bigger than the 3D set. He has started the animation already, outside of the scene and wants me to later composite this over the 3D background in After Effects. Reason being, that he didn't want to resize RAM and place him in the scene as it skrews up the toon shading on RAM. Doing it this way may not look as good as rendering from the set. For example lighting would be different and will have to be redone in After Effects. This of course means more work for me, but also wouldn't look as good as if it was already in the 3D scene with the scene's lighting. I suggested to Daryl that the best way in my opinion, is that RAM should be resized and to contact Moe (the creater of the model and toon shading) to see if he can adjust the toon shading afterwords so it doesn't skrew up. If this is possible then I see this as the best option as it means less work for me and no need to add extra grading as it won't be needed.

I have also showed James how to ink in so that he can start inking some scenes also.

I also asked Daryl to make a list of all the cameras he created in Maya and to create a chart with which scenes go to which camera. I could go through them myself, but it makes sense, and saves time if Daryl does this as he has already created them and he originally named the 2D scenes also.

Harrison worked out a good technique in order to reduce/eliminate cleanup issues with scans. I have asked him to relay the information to Daryl and have asked Daryl to use his technique in future scans. The reason that Daryl should use this technique is because he is already using Photoshop to batch scan his work and using Photoshop actions in order to reshape/resize the images in preparation for inkers such as myself to use. Whilst he does the scans it will be easy to implement this technique into actions alongside his other changes so that the files come out cleaned as well as cropped.

Recently I have been working with Daryl in order to complete the inking of the 2nd Year’s 2D audience animations.  I have also worked for Anja this week in re positioning all the cranes within the scene.

Friday 1st May

I attempted to make the Fish Animation even slower at the beginning and quicker at stay in teh middle more as Anja suggested. Unfortunately I was having many problems with the fish randomly turning angles, even when adding new keyframes previously redone frames would change. I had no idea how to sort this out and have giving the animation all I can. I let Anja know how much trouble I was having with it and she said she would finish the rest.


This is the exact reason I only wished to do effects/compositiong/editing for Anja from the beginning as I told her I have never animated like this before before.

Considering this I am surprised I managed to work out motion paths as well as I did. I guess it would be better if someone rigged the fish to the motion path better than me, perhaps someone with more experience with them.

Continued Inking in Daryl's frames also.